Of taste and tactility

I hope that our child, who is growing up in a land where touching food with one’s hands is frowned upon, will appreciate how eating with fingers is an intricate part of his ancestral identity

I’m writing as the ragù or the Bolognese stews in its juices. I am aware I should have accommodated for more time because that is the unspoken ingredient in this most Italian of dishes. But I am being forgiving of my failure because I am also still learning to inhabit this new schedule we are arriving at and trying to perfect. Ever since our child began needing a five-hour wake window before his first and only nap of the day, we’ve had to improvise our routine so I can make the most of the morning, which is when my partner now takes on increased child-care responsibilities, allowing me to work and to cook us lunch. We are steadily working towards equalising the gap in parental responsibility. As our child gradually weans himself off me, making my presence substitutable with other caregivers, like his grandparents, I am learning to reclaim my share of time.

Until recently, my partner had taken on the task of cooking for us for the day. Since he only must be at work at noon, so is home until 11.15 pm, he was able to find time to cook while I put our child down for a nap. This new schedule, however, has allowed me to return to cooking and it feels invigorating to constantly improvise, to decide our menu for the week, to experiment, again, with new flavours and, most importantly, to feed our growing child, who has an unabashed preference for Indian cuisine. I’ve never seen any child eat a chole rice the way I saw him gobble it up the other day, his fingers mimicking the gestures my fingers make in order to mash the rice together into a morsel that is customised with the chole and the dahi. He feeds himself while I feed him, and I love to watch him shamelessly use his fingers and lick his hands and to see his entire face covered in dahi and curry.

This may sound commonplace for those of you reading this back home in India. But where I live, touching food with one’s fingers is frowned upon and viewed with repulsion, even disgust. Children are introduced to cutlery from a very early age. It’s like this whole dimension of experiencing a meal—touching each element to interpret its texture, flavour profile, consistency—is erased from their dining experience. I watch parents wipe their kids’ mouths as soon as there is even the slightest spill of yoghurt or puree. It’s hyper-sanitised. As an immigrant parent who eats with their fingers, who even taught their partner to eat Indian food like a pro, this approach feels like an act of resistance. I have begun to think of it in the same vein as imparting a language. Except, this feels even more precious. This business of eating with fingers feels ancestral, rooted in bloodlines, in culinary traditions, in kitchenly rituals… it is entangled with the logic of what can constitute a single meal, how different parts are meant to come together and how the experience of nourishment, of food entering the body and eventually the blood, is ushered through the connections between finger and brain cells and all the information that is rendered within those moments of communication.

My kitchen is an inauthentic one. Some days I cook versions or approximations of Goan dishes, some days I make something more inspired by Bengali cuisine, sometimes South Indian, or Bangladeshi. I borrow many cooking styles from the Southeast Asian kitchen, from my travels in Myanmar and Thailand. I have now appropriated many South Tyrolean recipes and I am currently in the process of working with Italian dishes, understanding the various regional specificities. I am hoping that our child will learn to code switch between these cuisines, understand, inherently, when to use his hands, when to use a fork and spoon and knife, and when to give in and lick his fingers. A mother I know whose child is now seven and hates art classes told me his dislike was rooted in the fact that he never liked to touch his food. His kindergarten teachers even asked the mother if she had banned him from doing so. He doesn’t appreciate tactility, or the messiness that exploration with fingers involves. I hope we can enable our child to appreciate how eating with fingers is an intricate part of his ancestral identity, so he understands that the process of having a meal involves more than just ushering food into the mouth and chewing. It’s about modifying each morsel, a little bit of vegetable, a little bit of meat, a little bit of pickle… This delicate balance of textures, flavours and the play between them. This practised deliciousness.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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